Traditionally, in order to initiate contact with customers, businesses utilize call centers to initiate contact from a landline of a business to a customer telephone. It is increasingly common for telephone numbers provided by customers to be mobile phone numbers and for customers to be utilizing smart phones having capabilities beyond reception of voice calling. For example, while the customers have the technology to receive voice calls, they also have the capability to send and receive SMS texts and emails and engage in online chat sessions using internet connectivity on the same mobile device.
While the availability of a mobile phone number would seem to increase chances that a customer can be reached, customers are often otherwise engaged and unable to handle a voice call. Typically, when unable to answer a voice call, customers simply do not answer the call or turn off their ringers. No currently available system or method exists for customers to indicate that they are willing to accept a call from the landline, but are temporarily unable to do so, for example by requesting a call-back or scheduling other follow-up communications.
With respect to certain types of calls, for example, collections calls, the connection success rate is extremely low. The outbound success rate, known as “right party contact rate” or RPC rate is often less than two percent. When businesses make a high volume of calls, even a modest improvement to the RPC rate results in a large additional number of motivated customers per month.
With the continued rise of smartphone technology, SMS texting has emerged as a communication medium of choice for modern consumers. Texting encourages concise communication with its small message-size limit. Because texting is asynchronous, the process of exchanging texts does not involve wasted time. Customers are able to focus on other tasks while awaiting a response. Out of customer frustration with other available inadequate modes of communications, customers frequently prefer responding to calls with an SMS text. Because the business calls are generally tied to landlines, business personnel do not receive these texts. The pervasiveness and familiarity of text messaging makes it an ideal channel to communicate with and retain customers.
Accordingly, a solution is needed that will allow mobile users to employ SMS texting to allow customers to respond to voice calls with a text that will reach an existing land line. Further, a solution is needed that will transport SMS texts sent to business landlines to a message router that will allow scheduling of follow up communications by customers who are temporarily unable to accept incoming calls.